Jules Thornton and her boyfriend Pete Morrison at Briar Hill Farm are recovering from the hurricane which finished the first book in the Eventing series. Their sport involves riding cross country, showjumping and dressage. Jules had to give up her farm and move her horses into a barn on Pete’s family farm. Her PRIDE is seriously damaged and she spends most of this novel trying to hold her head so high, she falls over her feet.

Jules really is her worst enemy this time, making it hard to cheer for her. Pete, like most young trainers in financial straits, seeks a sponsorship and is approved by a prestigious firm of made-to-measure horse tack and rider clothing. He can spend the summer in England improving his riding on cross-country courses. The same firm, Rockwell Brothers, offers Jules a sponsorship provided she spends summer near Orlando with Grace Carter, an old-school dressage trainer. Being separated will be difficult for the young couple. Especially as Pete will be surrounded by elegant horsey girls, Jules is thinking. The Eventers gossip blog already calls him a pin-up guy. Jules hates dressage, considering it the boring part to be endured before cross-country. She also thinks her riding is good enough.

The farm will be looked after by Lacey and Becky from the previous book, so after a false trail that goes nowhere, Jules reluctantly agrees to the terms. She brings Danger Mouse and Dynamo to Sea Breeze Farm and takes a step backward to be a working student again, at the beck and call of pricey boarders and other grooms, training Grace’s young horses and getting half an hour’s dressage instruction a day. Suffice it to say, Grace is not impressed.

I love a lot about these books by Natalie Keller Reinert. She knows horse personalities as well as details of the sport, while the topographical and weather background makes Florida so real on the page. The most fun item is when the fireworks from nearby Disney brighten the night; however, the constant housing development is eroding the space for horses. I don’t recommend PRIDE to anyone who doesn’t know the first thing about riding, because there isn’t a lot else going on in the story.

My feeling about Jules is that she has crashed too many good horses through too many fences, and she must know that seat-of-the-pants riding is not sufficient at a high level. In the first book Ambition, we saw that she used her college fund to buy a farm, and lost the farm. Now, perhaps she feels inadequate as she has no degree or prospect of one, angry that the hurricane wiped out her purchase, trying to justify her actions to herself. She hates doing stable work for entitled, snobby brats whose families see horses as status symbols. I believe the workload described in the heat is excessive, and Jules never gets a day off or evening in town. It must be said, she does not try to make friends. Real-life British eventer Lucinda Prior-Palmer said she had been advised to make all the friends she could on her way up, as there would be no time to make them on the way down. That’s why I say PRIDE is sure to go before a fall. The next installment is called Courage, and these books have been re-edited and reissued.